Theatre-Rites & Polka Theatre: Beasty Baby

Polka Theatre is a wonderful child-friendly venue that has all the homely charm of a worn and well-loved teddy bear, or a toy box you can walk into. It has two performance spaces: the main space with all you would expect of a theatre space and the Adventure Theatre, which used to be little more than a carpeted room and now is blessed with great technical support in a space no bigger than a large dining room.

Beasty Baby takes advantage of this intimacy in a very domestic performance where three people (Sian Kidd, John Leader, and John Pfumojena) come in from the cold to prepare for a baby, imagine the arrival, and then deal with a small but rapidly growing infant. There are so few words in this performance that each time a performer speaks it has significance.

The charm and accessibility of this combination of physical performance, puppetry, and music is a result of director Sue Buckmaster’s great experience in creating this style of work, resulting in a show that perfectly captures the shock, delight, tedium, exasperation, and joy of caring for a small child. With repeating refrains of the various rituals of parenting, and some beautiful live musicianship and singing, Beasty Baby successfully creates an astonishingly beautiful poetry of visual theatre that not only keeps small children fascinated and amused but also celebrates parenting – honouring and touching the parents and carers in the audience.

Having three performers on stage, and giving the puppeteer, Sian Kidd, the primary responsibility of animating and voicing the larger beasty baby puppet (with a delightful babble of half-formed words and an impulsive, determined character) means that the two male performers become a tag-team of surrogate fathers who have to cajole, distract, encourage, and delight this toddler with ever more inventive tactics. It’s sadly common in children’s theatre to see very few fathers and male carers in the audience. Even when they are in attendance, it’s often the case that they aren’t engaging in sharing the experience with their children. John Leader and John Pfumojena provide some wonderfully positive modelling of good parenting, often tired, exasperated and having run out of ideas, only to find a new tactic that works – momentarily.

The show feels quite Scandinavian in Verity Quinn’s clean design, yet there are some wonderful African rhythms and vocal harmonies sung live supporting the music composed by Jessica Dannheisser. The blend of different cultural influences adds an interesting texture to the piece, freeing it of being located in any one culture. Simple but effective set changes give the satisfying appearance of emerging naturally from the play/parenting and the precision of its physical theatre and puppetry is of a very high standard.

Theatre-Rites and Polka Theatre have created a small but perfectly formed gem of a show, full of emotional resonance and surprising depth that perfectly captures the early years experience, from the perspective of both the child and the parent.

Smoking Apples: In Our Hands

Against a backdrop of thick plastic vertical strips, Smoking Apples tell a tale of the fishing industry using performance, visual theatre, and puppetry. Not a single line of dialogue is spoken on stage, although some text is delivered through the media of answering machine messages and radio broadcasts. The main part of the narrative is conveyed either through scenes where human characters interact with puppet characters presented as disembodied heads and hands, or through clever uses of scenery, props, toys, and other devices to create miniature scenes of ships on the water, cars and trucks driving and delivering cargo, or brief shadow puppetry presentations.

All the main characters are puppets – the grizzled old fishing captain in financial trouble but loved by his human crew mates, the captain’s son who has fled the family business to work in PR in the city, and the small young seagull that never quite manages to snatch that tasty treat. The team of five performers work as an ensemble to create scenes and present transformations in the style of crew mates at sea – all knowing their job, sometimes having a bit of a laugh, sometimes in total concentration. Most of the scenes are brief, and the whole performance comes across as a cleverly connected series of vignettes that both explain a bit about the fishing industry and tell the story of how the drink-dependent father and worried, guilty son, both mourning the loss of their wife/mother, confront the pressing financial issues that threaten fishing.

The dramaturgy, sound design, and set design are all strong and consistent. The plot is mostly clear and the pre-recorded spoken text supports the dialogue-free performance. Smoking Apples are wonderfully and playfully inventive when it comes to making visual effects, and are committed to the puppetry, which they use to good effect. The device of a head and hand operated by one puppeteer (Matthew Lloyd for Alf and Luke Breen for Ben), occasionally supported by an extra hand operated by another puppeteer (Molly Freeman for Alf) demands a high level of precision which wasn’t always there, and when the two puppet characters have scenes together the inability to speak becomes an issue rather than an asset, which is a testament to the power of the piece. We believe in and care about the father and son, and we want to see and hear the emotions in their confrontations.

Smoking Apples are visually inventive and playful, willing to take the time and effort to create a satisfying piece of theatre, and are developing their own trademark style. In Our Hands illuminates the world of fishing in a remarkably original and unique way.

Green Ginger: Outpost

A remote border crossing is the setting for this new show from the renowned and much admired Green Ginger whose work, like many of the best UK puppetry companies, receives more recognition outside the UK than within our own borders.

This production features classic tabletop puppetry and in design comes across as a three-dimensional staged graphic novel. On the surface it’s a dusty remote pair of tiny turret-like dwellings facing each other across a single rising barrier, and the play opens with a new guard (Luis) arriving, full of patriotic and xenophobic enthusiasm, and encountering the other inhabitant: a grizzled old veteran with a good heart and a cynical and pragmatic outlook on his job (BK – pronounced Beekay).

The three puppeteer performers (Chris Pirie, Adam Fuller, and Kim Heron) bring these characters to life with skilful manipulation and good teamwork. At first it appears that the Kim, the only female performer onstage, is condemned to operating the feet of the puppets moved and voiced by Chris and Adam, but the appearance of Madame President, fleeing an unfortunate diplomatic incident fuelled by the protests at the ‘Extravision Song Contest’, gives Kim a marvellous character to operate and voice, which she does admirably. This intimidating mix of Margaret Thatcher and Augusto Pinochet needs a bolthole, and Luis takes her to the newly-discovered cave he and BK fell into where a new source of power awaits to fuel her ambition.

In puppetry, design is everything, and using puppets with practical mouths means a responsibility to provide well-written dialogue as well as clever staging. Outpost delivers plenty of philosophical – though not subtle or sophisticated – material on migration, patriotism, power, politics, and society. In the opening scene Luis forbids a fly from crossing the border, bemoaning the surge of immigrants attempting to get into his precious homeland, and casually crushes it beneath his boot. Later he becomes the willing lackey of the psychopathic president, rapidly promoted. It’s only when she orders him to commit murder that he starts to question his loyalty to his leader.

Yet it’s worth noting that puppets do some things much better than human actors: they die better, they transform much better, and they have the ability to represent concepts through symbolism and metaphor better. A puppet can be a character and a symbol in a way that an actor can’t. A cast of actors and physical theatre performers could equally present this script: the writer still has some lessons to learn about how to fully take advantage of the power of puppet theatre.

There are some impressive effects, including one epic scene change, and a very well designed soundscape by Benji Bower that supports the production powerfully. There are perhaps not enough, though, of the transformations that puppetry lends itself to so well. However, the script is powerful, the production and design brilliantly realised and the performers have the skills and experience to bring the characters and events great focus and energy. Director Joseph Wallace has blended the visual elements and vocal delivery well, the plot is well paced and the lighting design helps to sustain a high visual impact on stage in a production that manages to capture how politics can make puppets of us all.

Third Rail Projects: Then She Fell

A blank-looking house on a Brooklyn street is the setting for Then She Fell, a long-running promenade piece that’s been drawing New York audiences for over three years now. Third Rail Projects, led by Zach Morris, Tom Pearson, and Jennine Willet, specialise in immersive work – something that appears to be much less common on this side of the ocean. It’s become so en vogue in the UK that I often begin my journeys with trepidation that the work is merely a gimmick trying to replicate the big hitters like dreamthinkspeak or Punchdrunk. Indeed, my own work with Dante or Die has been similarly approached by audiences and critics. Although how many productions of Hamlet are produced every year without comparison to each other?!

However, a dance-theatre piece in a period house, with cabinets of curiosities to explore galore and up-close and personal interaction… One can’t help but at least acknowledge the similarities. And now I shall move on, because that’s where the comparison can end. Third Rail invite only fifteen audience members per show into Kingsland Ward, a century-old institutional facility. Having had quite a stern but wry briefing about not opening any locked doors, given a set of keys and a shot of some rather bitter tasting booze, we’re separated into smaller groups or lone travellers. One of the joys of the piece is is that we have solitary moments with performers, and are then dumped into a room with three others, before being whisked behind another door to join a different audience member. My brain was frantically trying to work out the stage management and audience routes. Soon enough I gave up and just enjoyed the well-oiled, excellently crafted ride.

My first room set the scene. Our firm guide sits at a long table opposite me. She shoots a silver cup down the table towards me – I catch it. Suddenly she’s sliding across the table towards me and fills both our cups with bubbling cold liquid. We clink and drink. Before I know it she’s swiped the cup and darted to the other side of the table, returning to present a box with a lock. I fumble for my keys but none of them fit. She dangles a tiny, tiny key in front of my face – as I reach towards it she has already made it disappear and has popped it under a cup (there are now three). I finally get my hands on the key and open the box – a letter from Lewis Caroll to Alice Liddell.

Over two hours I meet two versions of Alice, a man embodying the white rabbit, Lewis Carroll himself, The Mad Hatter (brilliant), and nameless orderlies who now and then pop up to open another door for us. The building itself is not that large – we move only between three floors – but Third Rail have concocted a dizzying rabbit hole journey as we are commandingly landed into another space before revisiting spaces through a different door later. It really does feel like a dream that you have no control over; and yet we are made to feel incredibly safe and taken care of. I applaud their audience management and interaction – space is left for us to explore as well as interact with performers yet at the same time we are being brought on a very specific journey.

Highlights included combing Alice’s hair whilst talking about my first love, frantically trying to notate for the Mad Hatter who keeps changing her mind about what she should write, and a magical duet between two versions of Alice, each behind a two-way mirror. Cleverly, I was treated to seeing both angles of that delicate moment. The choreography (created by the original ensemble) is detailed and urgent; and importantly, is entirely specific to the space in which it is performed. Alice and Lewis’s duet on a staircase sees them both ascend and descend on an angle, and sinuously wrap around the banisters. It’s a beautiful moment that crystalises the impossible love story that Then She Fell handsomely shares with us. The overall experience is a nuanced exploration of love, madness and the fragmented self.

Then She Fell is booking to March 2016 and Third Rail Projects’s new show, The Grand Paradise, opens in Brooklyn next month.

Walid Raad: Scratchings on things I could disavow: Walkthrough

Walid Raad, dressed unremarkably in a black t-shirt and dark blue jeans, speaks to a group of 40 people seated in MoMA’s beautifully open Marron Atrium. Armed with blue headphones, his voice is channeled into our eardrums, drowning out the chatter, laugher and general hubbub that fills one of modern art’s most famous buildings. We sit facing a large white wall with an enormous chart facing us. It is filled with drawings of faces pinging out at us encircled by bright colours, arrows pointing to names of several organisations and lengthy contracts. It’s a busy wall of detailed information.

Raad tells us that he’s not an actor, that he can get nervous, and may need to move around during his performance. That’s the first of many slippery sentences in which our narrator wrong-foots us. In fact, he is a compelling storyteller who magnetically draws us into his world in an instant. His story begins with a woman called November who contacts him to invite him to be part of the Artist Pension Trust – a scheme for artists to invest their own artwork in order to create a pension for themselves. As he begins to investigate the scheme it leads him on an intriguing story of investors who have all served in the Israeli army and he questions his safety as a Lebanese man if he were to invest his art within this worldwide system. This kicks off an hour-long monologue in which five art-works are used as props to investigate the blurred lines between artistry, commerce and war.

We move between five areas within the atrium. Projections of empty art gallery walls create an eerie backdrop for what appears to be a factual account of how the Arab world is building a new empire of art galleries and theatres, built by ‘starchitects’. But who are this new, giant Guggenheim Museum and Louvre Museums in Sharm Al Sheik for exactly? Raad suddenly becomes a normal Arabic man, ten years from now, who walks to the entrance of the newly opened gallery wearing a black T-shirt and dark blue jeans and is almost-violently refused entry. It’s a quietly unnervingly image that lingers uncomfortably in my mind.

The third section utilises his celebrated work The Atlas Group (1989 – 2004), which was inspired by his research into the Lebanese Civil War in which 100,000 people were killed. Having been pestered for years by a curator (could this be true?) he finally agrees to display his work in Lebanon but when he arrives to see it hung, everything has shrunk to 1/100 of its size. It’s a miniature. Someone must be playing a joke on him, or is he having a psychotic episode?

The entire performance has this nightmarish, slippery quality that experiments with narrative – what is true? What should we believe? We are entirely invested in Raad’s narrative until he slides in a quietly dark image, or an unquantifiable ‘fact’ – he tells us with great sincerity that all of the colours framed on the wall have disappeared, yet we can see them. And he keeps us smiling – he’s funny, charming, convincing. As we roam the artworks alone after he’s left we’re faced with our own reflection in four large frames of grey. Who are we within all of these forces: the arts, the economies that celebrate and fund these arts, and the wars taking place with faces that we never see. It’s a powerful performance, whose force sneaks up on you, and lingers in the mind.

Total Theatre